Seul l'air

"Since her first research in Cambodia, a country and culture with wich she has a special and long-standing ond, right up to her work on “lost objects”, observers and critics have come up with a collection of adjectives that try, never with complete success, to define her work: “self-effacement, impressionism, finesse, discretion, melancholy, vibration, oneirism…”. While all these qualifiers rightly describe Laurence Leblanc’s subtle manner and the disquiet her photographs provoke, they sometimes blur the meaning of her approach. Because Laurence Leblanc is a rare example of a photographer who takes restraint as her starting-point. For her, the photographic act is constructed by gradually impregnating herself with the subject and its environment; and the resulting picture stems, in turn, from a meticulously constructed process. Extremly attentive to the violence of the world and to the chaos of destinies, she strips her gaze of all documentary curiousity – she knows that other have there before her – to focus on what is not visible: the mutism of old pain, the texture of an absent gaze. Channelling the flow of raw emotions anf with-standing the demands of hyperspeed, she strives to photograph the “sediment” that an event, a landscape or a face has enduringly left inside her."

Benoit Rivero